Regarding A Kiss for the Petals: Maidens of Michael’s Removal from Steam

Firstly we would like to thank all of you for your patience with us and apologize for taking so long to formally address this topic. We had been hoping to resolve the situation or at least obtain some additional information from Valve beyond what has been already circulating publicly via third parties before making a statement, but we are unfortunately still quite empty-handed despite several attempts on our end.

Much of this will not be news to those of you who have been following the situation closely, but to clarify things and dispel some of the rumors that have been circulating, this is what we know: A Kiss for the Petals: Maidens of Michael was removed from the Steam storefront by Valve staff, we believe in response to a malicious and patently false user report. We do not know if or when the game will return to the platform at this time; it is very much out of our hands. That said, Maidens of Michael is currently and will continue to be available from our storefront. The game’s removal was not the fault of any of the game’s localization staff and no one has been fired or punished as a result.

We will keep you all updated with any information we do have as we become apprised of it. Thank you again for your continued patience and understanding; we assure you we are just as frustrated as you are about this situation.

Nice info you got there Carlos thanks.
If valve pisses me off enough I’m going to copy as many staff names and images and ask the airline I work for if they could put them on a watch list, but I doubt they’d do it sadly.

Glad to hear an update, even if it’s just “Valve is taking their usual 500 years to do anything at all (…except remove Maidens from their platform), all we can do is wait for a response.” Valve’s come off looking like hot garbage since Day 1 of this fiasco.

I was always going to buy from MangaGamer’s storefront anyway, but I like visual novels existing on Steam just to actively showcase to my friends that I’m buying and playing these niche games, doing my part to give exposure to the products I enjoy. It’s why I bought hardcopies of Princess Evangile and W Happiness. On the bright side for MG, this may mobilize me to buy a digital copy of Maidens rather than waiting months to see if we’ll get physical copies, since there (presumably) won’t be a bonus Steam key inside anyway if it doesn’t return to Steam’s storefront. :/

Slightly off-topic and possibly may seem rude to ask this but as of late I have seen a fair few complaints from people in the industry with regards to how many units shift of various VNs.

Is the western VN industry in jeopardy at the moment or is this just doom saying? I’ve been a customer of MG since the early days and I would really hate to see things go down hill considering how much hard work and effort you guys put in to get a variety of releases out and to drag the overall quality of the western market up.

I can only speak for myself in this regard but I would be fine with a reasonable price increase if things were actually as bad as some have made out.

Hopefully this isn’t the case and I am just over reacting. Odd as it may be for a consumer to say it but I really appreciate what MG does for this niche market.

MG has been in the black for almost five years now I believe. Of the localization companies they have the most consistent release schedule and slow growth. I expect that a number of the recent startups might die out in a few years(Key is basically already gone, Frontwing will give up, Sol press and Nekonyan will just die) because sale expectations versus the reality just don’t match up since the bubble broke. On the other hand MG has years of sales data so they most likely know how to budget for any given title.

Basically, if you go into vn’s planning on steam getting you huge sales, you’re dead. MG has enough data to know what to expect and budget around that so I doubt they are in any trouble. Of the current localization companies Jast, MG, and Sekai are the most stable.(though sometimes it feels like Sekai are flailing around and jumping to different business ideas so they may not be as stable as they should be)

As far as I understand a lot of the doom and gloom is that people don’t understand the reality of how bad adult payment processor’s are, and that a lot of projects were made for the steam bubble that are only now coming out, a year after said bubble burst. That and people seem to overestimate sales in general.

Thanks for that, its nice for someone with a bit of background information to clear it up. While I have been a customer of MGs for almost 8 years now I tend to just stick to consuming content and not delving into the business end of things, it just struck me how, of late, there was so much negativity from some of those inside the industry lately as opposed to their previous positivity or simple promotion of their work/projects.

There are not a lot of companies in general I would genuinely feel broken up over going belly up but MG and Jast/jlist are on that list, sekai…as you say they are a bit all over the place and of those 3 MG is the only one I feel puts out content at any kind of regular pace and with by far the most variety and polish.

I do hope some of the new players do well enough to keep going though.

If MangaGamer is selling about 100,000 units both digital/physical at about $30 USD that should be enough assuming staff is less than 20 people, take away taxes then about 65% of remainder to pay staff (assuming pay is $25-$30 USD/per hour per employee) then use whats left for all other expenses (utility’s, computers, licensing fees, physical goods, etc.).
If they’re getting cheap/free support that helps too.
Now for me I’m averaging over 5 units per year so if that applies to everyone that means they would need a consistent group of 20,000 people to get 100,000 units.

All of this is hypothetical but I’m pretty sure they’re selling to more than 20,000 people worldwide which tells me they’re not in any trouble. Plus I’m sure the exposure they got by using Steam helped the company. Another sign is they’re starting a mobile service, which tells me they’re still expanding/growing. I also forgot to mention they’re still going to conventions with game makers, VAs and such attending with them.

When you buy from MG you get a sale number on your product in your account. If you buy a game every time a new one comes up you can get an idea of the number of games sold within a month. If we assume everyone buys 1 game at a time then yearly sales are somewhere between 24k and 36k(not accounting for bundles or sales) so not even half of 100k and for every steam release they get around 1k to 2.

And no, employees in the localization business don’t get anywhere near 25-30$ an hour. Translators barely used to get minimum wage equivalent since they get paid based on text count. One of the big reasons this market is sustainable is because everyone works for cheap.

Ya I figured they’d be off since I don’t know what the pay scale is for that line of work and anything affiliated with it. If wage is lowered then needed unit sales to stay afloat also drops, wages with/without benefits are almost always the highest expense percentage wise for any company. In this case though corporate tax may be a higher expense percentage wise than wages with/without benefits but without actual numbers… Hard to tell.

There’s also royalties and how bad adult payment processors can be, especially after the chargeback/fraud issue from a few years ago. It helps that MG technically only has like 3 employees and everyone else is a free-lancer. No insurance to really worry about and you are only paying people for actual work done so budgeting is easier, or at least I would believe.

Still, MG is probably well off compared to some other groups. They cater to a wide audience and are growing.

Once again, yet another fine case of GUNS GOOD BOOBS BAD, brought to you by ‘murica. Seriously, this is annoying – by applying the same logic they supposedly used to delist this SonoHana game, Valve should also delist every single bloody gorefest FPS. But hey, apparently in ‘murica, if you see a kiss between cute girls, or -God forbid- a nipple, it’s a sign of TERRIRISM and it should be removed with extreme prejudice!

I wouldnt completely blame it on ‘Merica.
If you checked those 2 “curators” account above, who supposedly reported this game, then you will notice they are both members of the group “Muslim empire”… thats self-explanatory, I believe.

Valve is about to start playing games again, maybe they want to get rid of the competition? 😉 And for a serious one – then every normal person should understand this situation. Thanks for the infomination!